The present invention relates to an object-oriented image representation method and apparatus using irregular meshes, and more particularly, to a method for representing an object contained in an image using an irregular mesh and an apparatus thereof.
An international standardization endeavor with respect to a moving image compression technology, such as an MPEG IV (Moving Picture Experts Group), for coding a moving image at a low bit rate for the purpose of application in a videophone or a video conference system, is in progress. To encode a moving image at a very low bit rate, various object-oriented motion image coding methods, each of which encodes a significant object in the motion image and transmits the encoded result, are widely under study. Also, to accomplish a motion compensation for removing a temporal correlation of a motion image, certain motion compensation methods are being widely studied. According to these motion compensation methods a spatial transformation, such as an image warping capable of more effectively representing an actual movement of an object, is applied to an image represented in the form of a mesh.
In the image representation, it can be seen that an irregular mesh can reflect the local features of an image very well and can represent the image features well using only a small number of control points.